One of the most destructive and yet least-understood natural phenomena in the world is a supervolcano. Only a handful exist in the world but when one erupts it will be unlike any volcano mankind has ever witnessed. The explosion will be heard around the world. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter.

Scientists have revealed that it has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago… so the next is overdue.

Now granted I don’t believe that mankind has been around for 600k years, but the bible is not definitive as to how long it took to create the earth…and how long the “day” spanned. I doubt God was going by a calendar that wouldn’t be invented for a couple thousand years. Back from my rabbit trail, Yellowstone’s explosion would be catastrophic.

Let’s quote Bill Bryson…one of my favorite authors. Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone’s vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across–roughly the same dimensions as the park–and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of. The pressure that such a pool of magma exerts on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone and about three hundred miles of surrounding territory about 1,700 feet higher than they would otherwise be. It if blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond imagining.

For more reading, MSNBC – http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17629668/
“The ash fall from the last Yellowstone eruption covered all or parts of nineteen western states (plus parts of Canada and Mexico) nearly the whole of the United States west of the Mississippi. This, bear in mind, is the breadbasket of America, an area that produces roughly half the world’s cereals…It took thousands of workers eight months to clear 1.8 billion tons of debris from the sixteen acres of the World Trade Center site in New York. Imagine what it would take to clear Kansas.